Instead he said he relied on his pre-production ritual of watching four classics: Seven Samurai, The Searchers, Lawrence of Arabia, and It's a Wonderful Life, to help ensure the success of new projects.

I'm not even sure any of those four could make it into production these days. The Seven Samurai is long and the violence is anything but glamorous. Half of the action in Lawrence of Arabia would be replaced with CGI. Westerns hardly ever cut it anymore with only a few exceptions, and those seem to do poorly at the box office, and "It's a Wonderful Life" would be considered a made-for-TV project on the Hallmark channel.

There have been great movies made over the past couple decades, it's just that Spielberg hasn't made one in a while so he thinks they don't exist. Stevey, watch a good Woody Allen movie and see how it's done. I really love Match Point. Midnight in Paris was pretty damn good too and both were made within the last decade.

dopeydwarf:There have been great movies made over the past couple decades, it's just that Spielberg hasn't made one in a while so he thinks they don't exist. Stevey, watch a good Woody Allen movie and see how it's done. I really love Match Point. Midnight in Paris was pretty damn good too and both were made within the last decade.

Depending how broadly we are defining "great", I think Munich would count as a great movie. It's not an all timer, but if by "great" we mean something like 25 or 50 best of a decade, then Munich would count to me.

Nabb1:Instead he said he relied on his pre-production ritual of watching four classics: Seven Samurai, The Searchers, Lawrence of Arabia, and It's a Wonderful Life, to help ensure the success of new projects.

I'm not even sure any of those four could make it into production these days. The Seven Samurai is long and the violence is anything but glamorous. Half of the action in Lawrence of Arabia would be replaced with CGI. Westerns hardly ever cut it anymore with only a few exceptions, and those seem to do poorly at the box office, and "It's a Wonderful Life" would be considered a made-for-TV project on the Hallmark channel.

I'd agree that it would be difficult to make these movies today in Hollywood, but there are a lot of production houses overseas that would have the balls for it I think. South Korea for instance has had consistently good movies that are very different from your common blockbuster fodder coming out for years now. The Man from Nowhere, Oldboy, and Thirst comes to mind. And let's not forget that Seven Samurai is a Japanese movie and you can always depend on them to at least let Takashi Miike off the chain to make something... unique.

DamnYankees:dopeydwarf: There have been great movies made over the past couple decades, it's just that Spielberg hasn't made one in a while so he thinks they don't exist. Stevey, watch a good Woody Allen movie and see how it's done. I really love Match Point. Midnight in Paris was pretty damn good too and both were made within the last decade.

Depending how broadly we are defining "great", I think Munich would count as a great movie. It's not an all timer, but if by "great" we mean something like 25 or 50 best of a decade, then Munich would count to me.

Oh yeah, Munich was definitely great. It's a grim one which is why I think a lot of people wouldn't do repeat viewings, but I was on the edge of my seat throughout it.

dopeydwarf:There have been great movies made over the past couple decades, it's just that Spielberg hasn't made one in a while so he thinks they don't exist. Stevey, watch a good Woody Allen movie and see how it's done. I really love Match Point. Midnight in Paris was pretty damn good too and both were made within the last decade.

Hook, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, Minority Report and Munich have all been made within the last couple decades. Catch Me If You Can was fun if not great.

The Adventures of Tin Tin is currently at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. Plus he was the producer of Gladiator, Super 8, Letters from Iwo Jima and True Grit.

But yeah, Woody Allen could help him learn how to make an entertaining film

DamnYankees:mitchcumstein1: Hook, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, Minority Report and Munich have all been made within the last couple decades. Catch Me If You Can was fun if not great.

One of these things is not like the other...

I was 12 when that movie came out, it was made to appeal to me. I saw it with my grandfather, he died shortly thereafter, it will always have a soft spot in my heart.

mitchcumstein1:DamnYankees: mitchcumstein1: Hook, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, Minority Report and Munich have all been made within the last couple decades. Catch Me If You Can was fun if not great.

One of these things is not like the other...

I was 12 when that movie came out, it was made to appeal to me. I saw it with my grandfather, he died shortly thereafter, it will always have a soft spot in my heart.

That's cool - I liked that movie a lot when I was a kid also. But its objectively not a very good movie.

Sybarite:DamnYankees: Lando Lincoln: There was that War of the Worlds remake that was...oh, yeah, that sucked donkey balls. Who was the director of that one again? That guy should have been fired.

That was an excellent, excellent movie with one fatal flaw (the stupid son thing). But otherwise, brilliantly made movie.

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Lando Lincoln:DamnYankees: Lando Lincoln: There was that War of the Worlds remake that was...oh, yeah, that sucked donkey balls. Who was the director of that one again? That guy should have been fired.

That was an excellent, excellent movie with one fatal flaw (the stupid son thing). But otherwise, brilliantly made movie.

You are out of your freaking mind.

I don;t know what to say. The movie itself is not amazing, but the craftsmanship really is. Spielberg knows how to tell stories.

Two main reasons. First, the big studios are a bit gun-shy of losing their asses. Make a big enough bomb, and it can bankrupt your entire studio. After some big flops, a lot of them now want to maximize profits and they do that with a carefully selected handful of movies year in and year out. It's cynical, but it's keeping them in business. They can tell you the percentage of people that will attend a sequel just because they like the first movie. The studios can also tell you the percentage of profit increase that a film will earn if it gets NC-17 rating instead of an R rating. It's a science they've perfected and have winnowed down to a formula.

The other issue is the public at large. The studios put out a few big budget movies and a lot fewer small budget films because the studios have learned what we like, and most of what we like is crap. A few big-budget epics every year with a well-defined male/female dynamic, a couple low-rent films targeting the 16-24 crowd in which the cast of characters are always high school seniors, sprinkled in with a few sleepers that did well at film festivals and are getting a wider release. Americans like spotless heroes and easy to spot villains and a tidy resolution that ends with Happily Ever After. Are they gonna play The Raid in the United States in wide release? Probably not because some of the violence is graphic and parts of it may be offensive to American sensibilities.

DamnYankees:I don;t know what to say. The movie itself is not amazing, but the craftsmanship really is. Spielberg knows how to tell stories.

Yeah, "craftsmanship." As in, "Hey, wouldn't it be AWESOME if we had a scene where the aliens attacked a ferry boat full of cars and people and the boat started tipping over and the cars were all rolling around and smashing up people and stuff? And people DROWNING in the cars! Yeah, I know it doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense to have a ferry boat full of cars that don't work. I mean, why wouldn't all the people just push the dead cars off of the ferry boat and then an extra thousand people would be able to be loaded onto the ferry boat every trip? If we were to write this sensibly, then we wouldn't have that AWESOME SCENE where the cars go flying into the water and shiat!"

"There's not a lot of films I'd watch that are made over the past 20 years, because I'm much more of a romantic. I like to go way back to the source. I look at a lot of silent movies for inspiration because they're all told visually and they're all told with hyper-extended performance and with wonderful use of a frame. It's a way of getting my engine started."

mitchcumstein1:dopeydwarf: There have been great movies made over the past couple decades, it's just that Spielberg hasn't made one in a while so he thinks they don't exist. Stevey, watch a good Woody Allen movie and see how it's done. I really love Match Point. Midnight in Paris was pretty damn good too and both were made within the last decade.

Hook, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, Minority Report and Munich have all been made within the last couple decades. Catch Me If You Can was fun if not great.

The Adventures of Tin Tin is currently at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. Plus he was the producer of Gladiator, Super 8, Letters from Iwo Jima and True Grit.

But yeah, Woody Allen could help him learn how to make an entertaining film

Funny you should say that, I just watched Jurassic Park on BR the other night and for some reason it just didn't hook me in the same way it did when I was 13. Not a bad movie, but it hasn't aged particularly well IMO. I am a big fan of Schindler's List, Minority Report, Iwo Jima and Munich though. Saving Private Ryan is good but I'm not so sure I'd call it great. FWIW though, this is one of my favorite war movies ever:

DamnYankees:mitchcumstein1: We'll just have to agree to disagree on Saving Private Ryan.

Saving Private Ryan looks much worse in retrospect because of Band of Brothers, which basically did the same thing but did it SO much better. It just had the time needed to tell the story better.

Not really. Saving Private Ryan did the thing. Band of Brothers came along and told a different story while cannibalizing all the stuff that was good from Spielberg a full decade later.

It's like saying the ipad 2 is revolutionary technology whilst ignoring fact that the original iphone is the device that actually opened up the touch pad market beyond institutional devices like vending machines and restaurant menus.

doglover:Band of Brothers came along and told a different story while cannibalizing all the stuff that was good from Spielberg a full decade later.

Just to note - Band of Brother was filmed something like 1 year after Saving Private Ryan, not a decade.

doglover:It's like saying the ipad 2 is revolutionary technology whilst ignoring fact that the original iphone is the device that actually opened up the touch pad market beyond institutional devices like vending machines and restaurant menus.

But I never said Band of Brother was "revolutionary". I said it was better. I don't deny Saving Private Ryan was a more innovative piece of filmmaking, but that doesn't mean its better than that which built on it.